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“The challenge, I think, that we have going forward is not so much my personal management style or particular issues around White House organization,” Obama said. “It actually has to do with what I referred to earlier, which is we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly.”

Obama said “it was obvious that we needed additional controls in place” before Affordable Care Act enrollment began Oct. 1. Yet he said none of those controls center around the structure and style of his White House.

“I’ve got a strong chief of staff, but I’m holding every cabinet member accountable,” Obama said. “And I want to have strong interactions with them directly. Number two is, I have an open door policy, where I want people to be bringing me bad news, on time, so that we can fix things.”

The White House has been reluctant to publicly assign blame to individuals responsible for mangling the health care rollout. Obama and top aides have said firing officials responsible for the mess would be counterproductive because they were needed to help fix the system.

During the interview, recorded at American University hours before the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s death, Obama cited acquiring a driver’s license, an anecdote from state governments, to illustrate people’s regular problems with bureaucracies.

“The more we can just reorganize the guts of how these agencies work, the easier it’s going to be,” he said. “Because the White House is just a tiny part of what is a huge, widespread organization with increasingly complex tasks in a complex world.”

Obama reiterated his wish to consolidate federal government agencies that work with small businesses. And as is his custom, he placed the blame on Congress for standing in the way of his efforts to streamline government.

“The challenge we’ve got is that that requires a law to pass,” he said. “And frankly, there are a lot of members of Congress who are chairman of a particular committee. And they don’t want, necessarily, consolidations where they would lose jurisdiction over certain aspects of certain policies.”